Sarah M. Jordaan
Dr. Sarah Jordaan's research quantifies the environmental and economic trade-offs related to energy decisions. Her research group, Energy Technology and Policy Assessment (ETAPA), focuses on life cycle assessment, techno economic analysis, and technology innovation. Her research determines solutions for decarbonizing the electric and transportation sectors while supporting other sustainable development goals. Her courses are designed to educate and empower students across disciplines, enabling them to tackle the toughest problems in energy and environment. Her students and scholars have carried on to advanced academic education, government, and industry.
Prior to joining McGill University, she held appointments at Johns Hopkins University (2016-2022) at the School for Advanced International Studies and the Department of Environmental Health and Engineering. She was an affiliate member of the Hopkins Institute for Data Intensive Science and Engineering. From 2013-2016, Dr. Jordaan was an Assistant Professor of Energy Policy and Politics at the University of Calgary. There, she supervised graduate students completing their degrees in either political science (M.A.) or sustainable energy (M.Sc.). She also supervised graduate students from Lehigh's Energy Systems Engineering program.
Her foundations in government and public policy were strengthened at Harvard University (2010-2012) with the Energy Technology Innovation Policy research group at the J. F. Kennedy School of Government and she gained greater insight into climate science at the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. She has held positions with the Electric Power Research Institute, Shell Canada, the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, and the Ocean Sciences Center at the Memorial University of Newfoundland. She earned her PhD in 2010 at the University of Calgary in Environmental Design at the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Economy, and Environment. Her Bachelor's degree is in Physics with a minor in Computer Science from Memorial University.
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Ruttinger, A., S. Tavakkoli, H. Shen, C. Wang, and S. M. Jordaan. (2022) Designing an innovation system to support profitable electro- and bio-catalytic carbon upgrade. Energy & Environmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1039/D1EE03753F
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Tavakkoli, S., L. Feng, S. Miller, and S. M. Jordaan. (2022) The implications of generation efficiencies and supply chain leaks for the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions from natural gas fired electricity. Environmental Science & Technology, 56(4):2540–2550. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.1c05246
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Jordaan, S.M., Park, J. and S. Rangarajan. (2022) Innovation in intermittent electricity and stationary energy storage in the United States and Canada: A review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 158, p.112149. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2022.112149
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Jordaan, S.M., Combs, C. and Guether, E. (2021) Life Cycle Assessment of Electricity Generation: a systematic review of spatiotemporal methods. Advances in Applied Energy, p.100058. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adapen.2021.100058
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Jordaan, S.M., Q. Xu, and B. Hobbs. (2020) Grid-Scale Life Cycle Greenhouse Gas Implications of Renewable, Storage, and Carbon Pricing Options. Environmental Science & Technology, 54(17), pp.10435-10445. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.0c01861
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Surana, K. and S. M. Jordaan.‡ (2019) The climate mitigation opportunity behind global power transmission and distribution. Nature Climate Change, 9: 660–665. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0544-3 . ‡ denotes equal contribution.